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Scouting for Trouble

It’s a sad commentary on the state of our society when stating the obvious is a radical and controversial act, but here I go: Boys and girls are different.

This particular restating of the obvious was made necessary by a recent story that broke (in a British newspaper) of a 7-year-old boy in Colorado who wants to join the Scouts. The Girl Scouts, that is.

When his mother tried to sign him up, however, the troop leader told her, quite sensibly, that the Girl Scouts are for girls, and that boys are therefore ineligible. Even a boy “who looks and dresses like a girl” and “loves playing with dolls.”

If a child who is biologically male “identifies as a girl,” he suffers from a recognized mental illness known as “Gender Identity Disorder.” The solution, as Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh has said, is to treat such madness, not collaborate with it. If the “child’s family presents [him] as a girl,” it is doing him a grave disservice, on a par with a family who will let a child play in traffic merely because “it makes him happy.”

From what I can tell, the “family” here consists of an older sister and a single mother—news stories contain no mention of a father or any other male role model in the boy’s life. Could that have something to do with his preference for feminine interests?

This type of nonsense can only have the effect of driving away girls and parents who thought the Girl Scouts was for fellowship with other girls. But the Girl Scouts’ embrace of transgenderism is only the most recent in a long line of lurches to the left (unlike the Boy Scouts, who have fought for their traditional values all the way to the Supreme Court—and won).

Girl Scouts national conventions have featured open advocacy for radical feminism, abortion, and homosexuality. A sexually explicit AIDS pamphlet was distributed last year at a Girl Scouts event at the U.N. This is why many parents and girls are turning to more traditionally minded alternatives, such as American Heritage Girls.

There are an abundance of programs for children which are open to both sexes, and people who want more are free to establish them. But it is not "discrimination" to offer some programs or activities which are restricted to children of one sex, or to define that in terms of their biological sex.

It is naive to deny that there are fundamental differences between the sexes, yet the movements for same-sex "marriage" and transgender acceptance are premised on the notion that they are changeable or interchangeable.

It is bad enough that the myth of gender as merely a “social construct” is pushed on college students. Don’t push it on Girl Scouts as well.